On the media: Even if a story is too good to be true, USC gets schooled

On the USCTrojans.com website where the original story of senior defensive back Josh Shaw’s heroic exploits were once documented, the link produces this message now: “We’re sorry, this page does not exist.”

Fact is, what exists is a messy aftermath that’s hardly forgotten.

The story trumpeting how Shaw showed up on campus Sunday morning with two injured ankles as a result of rescuing his 7-year-old nephew from drowning in Palmdale had received more than 8,000 responses on Twitter and 7,800 Facebook shares between the time it was posted Monday afternoon and then taken down about 48 hours later.

That led to dozens more versions of the tale regurgitated in various forms of the mainstream media — most simply linking to the USC website — before the story abruptly changed course. Shaw eventually admitted, through a lawyer and issued by a school press release, that it was all a lie to cover up that he had instead fallen from a balcony. More details apparently to come, depending on whom you believe.

Pointing fingers at who was most responsible for dropping the ball in this whole process is a natural reflex, but there’s enough egg on everyone’s face — USC officials and local media included — that the campus could open a free omelette parlor and have every reporter involved take a slice of humble pie to go.

For starters, USC sports information director Tim Tessalone explained that Shaw must have recounted his story “25 to 30 times internally” between Sunday and Wednesday with all kinds of athletic department officials and coaches there.

“We all thought it was an amazing story when we first heard it,” Tessalone said after Thursday’s practice. “When we sat with him on Monday, we heard it again, we taped the interview, and one of the first things I told him was, ‘Josh, if anything is incorrect with this, the media will go through it with a fine-tooth comb.’

“It was kind of awkward for us to keep questioning him about it, over and over. And he’s telling this to us eye-to-eye. I hated to question his integrity, but we had no reason to doubt him based on his background.”

Tessalone said the decision made Monday to post the story, under the byline of social media director Jordan Moore, was because Shaw would have been seen on campus riding around in an electric wheelchair with two sprained ankles and there was more of a chance of a student or fan — or even a member of the media — tweeting the story out.

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“We said, ‘Let’s get ahead of this and, yes, it’s a hero, feel-good story, why not us tell people about it?’ ” Tessalone said. “Especially since it checked out at the time as best we could. There was no reason to call the LAPD. Even when we got calls on Tuesday from some national media saying they heard all the facts didn’t check out, we went back to Josh and he stayed firmly on the story.

“So now I’m listening to this tape again (from Monday) and asking myself, ‘What did we miss?’ We feel horrible that it turned out like this and regret it, but that’s how it happened. If he had just said that he injured himself slamming a basketball or stepping off a curb, that’s easy to fix. But this was a long, twisted, winding tale, and every time he retold it, it matched up, dead-on solid.”

Through the immediate magic of academia, this becomes a real-life example of something that students at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism can dissect for themselves without the stench of formaldehyde.

The news that Shaw had admitted to fabricating the story on Wednesday afternoon came just hours before Jeff Fellenzer’s journalism class called “Sports, Business, Media” took place on campus. Guest lecturer and Sports Illustrated writer Lee Jenkins briefly weighed in on the Shaw story — as much as he knew about it — before the class of 180 business majors, which included a few USC football players.

“This was a unique case of a school website generating news by promoting one of its student-athletes front and center, and media everywhere assuming that the story was completely legit and properly vetted by the school,” Fellenzer said Thursday morning. “It’s easy to see how anyone on the outside could make that assumption, but it speaks again to the critical importance of due diligence in fact-finding at all levels, especially when the story involves a high-profile player and program that can instantly become national news.”

Dan Durbin, director of the Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society on the USC campus, agrees that not only is this a test case for the importance of Fact Checking 101 but it’s a lesson in that school-run websites have to be just as diligent about posting stories as the outside media or else credibility and reliability will be compromised.

“Because the facts were wrong, it has an immediate and obvious outcome, leading to a story that continued to grow because of that one failing,” Durbin said. “And because we live in a world now where stories get repeated so quickly and endlessly, you have to get the information right. It’s another illustration that shows the dangers of the current media environment.

“Even with an athletic department website, it’s really public relations, but any kind of mistake will end up damaging your department and school, and you don’t want that to happen either.”

The bottom line to this story, Durbin adds, is that it is “relatively innocuous” when compared with more complicated tales that have happened involving players at Miami or Florida State in recent months.

“In an age with TMZ and all forms of social media going crazy with things, it’s all blown up with all sorts of mass pressure to get more and more stories of contradiction and hypocrisy. And if the story is inaccurate, there’s a long food chain to blame someone else for it.

“Thirty years ago, this kind of story wouldn’t have even made it out of the school. It would have died under its own weight. Stories aren’t allowed to die anymore. It’s a shark-eat-shark world. A story like this won’t disappear within this structure.”